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He will be the first technology mogul to own a major U.S. newspaper, and The Post’s success will hinge on how an Internet revolutionary tackles a company that still has to worry about printing presses and the price of ink.

Bezos is known as a unconventional thinker and someone who’s willing to invest heavily in projects that take years to mature and develop. From starting Amazon.com in the garage of his Seattle-area home to revolutionizing the publishing industry with the Kindle electronic reader a few years ago, Bezos has shown a tendency to make bold moves in areas that no one sees coming.

The deal underscores the rise of technology companies in the new American economy, with Bezos — whose net worth is estimated at $25.2 billion, according to Forbes — snapping up a flagship of the old media world. Bezos could bring an entirely new sensibility, forged in building one of country’s most successful Internet companies, to transforming a newspaper whose glory days exist in faded yellow clippings.

Bezos “is extraordinary in knowing how to play a long game and he’s passionate about content and delivering new content experiences. He’s also passionate about business models,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley-based technology forecaster.

“He reinvented book selling at a time when everyone thought books were dead. He invented the e-book when everyone thought it was impossible. And his whole career has been making a fortune by breaking the rules that everyone thought you should never break,” Saffo said.

For anyone watching Bezos in recent years, there were signs that he’s been taking a stronger interest in the future of media. Exhibit one: the Kindle. As Amazon.com seeks to expand the use of its e-reader, it wants to add content from digital books as well as newspapers, magazines and other periodicals — and the company has been steadily building up those offerings.

Back in 2009, Amazon and The Washington Post teamed up for an e-commerce experiment, with the Post linking to Amazon’s online store when books were mentioned in the newspaper’s articles and reviews. (The Post got a portion of the revenue from the sales that resulted.)

This year, Bezos himself made an investment in Business Insider, the business news website founded by former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget.

Bezos, in an interview with the Post, called the newspaper “an important institution” and said change would be inevitable “with or without new ownership.”

He added: “But the key thing I hope people will take away from this is that the values of the Post do not need changing. The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.”

Bezos by all accounts plays a hands-on role at Amazon.com and takes a data-driven approach to testing new features and concepts — qualities he may very well apply to overseeing the financially challenged newspaper.

The Amazon CEO told the Post he would stay in Amazon’s home base of Seattle and let the paper’s current management run the paper. But he clearly has been thinking about its future. He and Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Co., are longtime friends and have informally advised each other over the years, according to the newspaper.

Bezos began his business career at a hedge fund on Wall Street before deciding to drive cross-country to Seattle to launch what became Amazon in 1994. The company survived the dot-com collapse and expanded its retail offerings to become the dominant online store. The company introduced its first Kindle e-reader in 2007 and has also built a major business around cloud computing — offering companies on-demand Internet storage and processing power.

As the future new owner of the Post, Bezos’s political leanings are likely to come under close scrutiny.

Like clockwork, the Amazon CEO has given $5,000 annually to his company’s political action committee since 2000, for a total of $65,000, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Personally, his giving has tilted sharply to Democrats. He’s donated $14,000 to the party’s candidates in the last 15 years, with the majority going to Washington state’s senators, Patty Murray ($5,800) and Maria Cantwell ($6,200). He’s given $2,000 to Republicans — with a thousand each going to former Sens. Spencer Abraham (Mich.) and Slade Gorton (Wash.).

Bezos’s political giving was relatively under the radar until last year, when he waded into the national debate over gay marriage, with he and his wife, MacKenzie, pledging $2.5 million to defend the state’s gay marriage law at the ballot box.

Amazon as a company has seen its regulatory interests expand in Washington in recent years — from the government’s e-book price-fixing case against Apple to the legislative battle over collecting taxes on Internet sales. President Barack Obama used an Amazon warehouse in Tennessee as a backdrop for a speech on middle-class jobs last week — highlighting the company’s growing profile in the capital.